Computer vision technologies for manipulating digital interfaces with gestures are already here and mature; now it’s simply a matter of designing creative applications around them. And as with many design tasks, presentation is everything.
From comments, Jeremy Bailey sends along an example of a gestural interface in which elements are moved around with gestures. The project was constructed for the Squeaky Wheel Media Arts Center in Buffalo. The good news: the visuals are exquisite, as abstract patterns of colored light dance around the screen. The bad news: light-skinned folks will have to wear blackface and white gloves. Now, that would make for a different future – Minstrel Minority Report, anyone? Then again, white is likely to be a minority in the near future in countries like the US, so maybe it’ll be like the absence of left-handed mice – you’ll simply have to deal. (Okay, in all seriousness, there are ways around this problem that still use the basic tracking method – combining optical flow with color tracking – and the basic design here is still inspiring.)
The story that brought this on:
Minority Report Interface, Implemented in Flash + FLARToolkit, and Why it Rocks
In other computer vision news, Chris O’Shea points to this video demo of the upcoming game Your Shape for Wii, as featured on the excellent gaming blog Joystiq. It appears to me that the camera vision itself is fairly simple, but that the software is being clever about mapping foreground motion to some pre-determined 3D model of the body. Anyone else care to hazard a guess?